Still looks pretty damn good after the downgrade.

[SneakyBastard]

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Everyone keeps talking about the downgrade. However, my personal opinion is that even after the downgrade it still looks way better than any other rpg out there.

Take a look for yourself and decide.

 

[DeadProxy]

I don't bother registering comments like those in my brain. They're a stupid thing to say and those people are stupid for thinking it. The differences are minor and barely matter when you're sitting across the room for the console people. The pc people have their own problems, but even they are getting the better looking game by default because they can adjust all those settings, and have access to "ultra" settings that blow anything else out of the water, regardless if how it compares to the reveal many moons ago.

And this isn't a case like watch dogs, because that downgrade made a dull gray city even worse, where as The Witcher has a damn colourful world which will still look vibrant at shitty resolutions.

 

[Metalmacher]

Watch_Dogs also looked pretty damn good after the downgrade.

Witcher 3 gets a pass because it's a damn fine game, which what first impressions tells us at the moment. And Watch_Dogs... well some people like it, some don't. But it has a lot of problems...

Personally, I don't really give a damn for either of those games. I've enjoyed Watch_Dogs, mostly. And I'll enjoy Witcher 3, eventually.

 

[Arrk]

Sure, it looks damn great. But we were promised better. It's like someone saying here, take 2 million dollars, when they are actually handing you 1 million. It's still fucking awesome, just not what was promised.

 

[sanquin]

To be honest, it doesn't look better than Inquisition. Maybe a little bit better. Nothing ground-breaking like Witcher 2 did. Which was leagues above skyrim at the time.

 

[SneakyBastard]

Sure, it looks damn great. But we were promised better. It's like someone saying here, take 2 million dollars, when they are actually handing you 1 million. It's still fucking awesome, just not what was promised.

Thanks for clearing that up. I guess i understand why people are angry.

 

[RedDeadFred]

There's the occasional muddy texture, but even just running it on high (I can run ultra, but not well enough that I'd play through the whole game with it), but the game still looks better than anything I've seen. The graphics are still better than the vast majority of other games coming out, and the art puts it way over the top. The facial animations express emotion like I've never seen in video games which is amazing considering the amount of fully voiced dialogue scenes there are. Every person I talk to feels like a fleshed out being.

In short, I'm only 16 hours in and I've already lost track of the amount of times I've stopped and just admired the stunning views the game has to offer.

Their official statement about it was something along the lines of them needing to downgrade for consoles. However, they wouldn't have been able to get the game as is without budgeting around the extra money from console sales. They also say that it's not really much of a downgrade so much as they were just able to make the trailer look extra nice since it was just a snippet of what was to come. Making an entire open world look like that proved too difficult even though the trailer was gameplay footage.

Edit: It's probably also worth mentioning that few people's rigs would have been able to handle the game at what the original trailer had shown.

 

[The Madman]

To be honest, it doesn't look better than Inquisition. Maybe a little bit better. Nothing ground-breaking like Witcher 2 did. Which was leagues above skyrim at the time.

I've played and enjoyed both games on high to max PC settings and Witcher 3 looks a fair bit better than Inquisition.

It's not the texture resolution quality or detail nor even the lighting effects, but just how detailed and fluid in motion everything is that puts Witcher 3 a tier above Inquisition. The environments in Inquisition are pretty but unchanging, whereas in Witcher 3 there's just something ridiculously cool about watching the day go by, seeing the clouds roll in and rain come down, seeing the villagers run for cover or the sound of water dripping from the treetops. Everything feels alive in a way the video-gamey zones of Inquisition fails to do. Another example: In Inquisition you were the only person in the entire game that rode a horse and your companions would just magically vanish every time you did so till you later dismounted. It felt like a tacked on gimmick and last minute addition for the sake of advertising. In Witcher 3 your horse rides in from off screen when called, and when dismounting will automatically go seek out food and drink or flee from enemies and monsters. Other people ride horses, bandits and knights alike. It feels more natural.

The animations for talking and in cutscenes are also better with the Witcher 3. Again it's not the texture resolution or anything that makes the difference but instead how nice everything looks in motion. Bioware games always have this problem where the npcs seem to kinda robotically cycle between emotion states whereas in Witcher 3 it just looks far more natural with no sudden 'switch' from one emotion to another and seemingly a far greater range of emotion than the typical sad/angry/happy/joking range that Bioware tends to employ.

There's a lot of little details like that which just make the world look and act more impressively. Add in the truly massive size of the zones you can explore (You could probably fit the entirety of Inqusition in Velen alone) without even a single loading screen (Unless you fast-travel or load a game obviously) and it's just a more impressive feat all around.

Witcher 3 isn't perfect and it is noticeably not as good looking as the initial trailer showed, but even so I wouldn't hesitate to say it's the best looking game I've played to date. Kinda hard for me to be disappointed with that.

 

[sanquin]

--snip--

Haven't played the game yet myself, but I can imagine what you're saying is true. CDPR did the same with the other two witchers. They do always seem to manage to make the world feel more alive and natural than other similar series like Dragon Age and Elder Scrolls. Though I was talking about the graphics.

 

[Tilly]

It does still look great but it's surely the principle the needs to be stood up for that they just shouldn't get away with lying to their customers.
If you take the approach of "well yes, they lied. But we got an awesome game so who cares?", well that's gonna lead to a lot of lies that don't lead to great games. People need to think of these things in terms of incentive structures. We currently have an awful one.

 

[The Bucket]

If it looks so amazing, why didnt they let it stand by itself instead of lying for so long?

 

[SneakyBastard]

If it looks so amazing, why didnt they let it stand by itself instead of lying for so long?

What do you mean? As far as i recall they were pretty steady with releasing gameplay footage so you could follow the process along with them. Everyone saw the downgrade way before it was released, so they didn't really trick anyone?

 

[The Madman]

If it looks so amazing, why didnt they let it stand by itself instead of lying for so long?

Playing the game I've seen a couple shots right out of the initial trailers and by the looks of it the main difference are just some post processing effects and shaders rather than any major downgrade in the form of inferior textures or outright tomfoolery.

Looks to me like in the initial build the devs were working on some stuff that never quite made it into the final game, likely for performance and stability reasons. A thought that's backed up by the devs themselves saying as much here.

So no, they never lied, this isn't a Watch Dogs style situation where people were being deliberately misled. Simply an old fashioned case of "We couldn't get this stuff working properly before release". Though on the plus side the devs are planning to try and add it back in for PC users and have already begun making tweaks in patches. There's a couple mods out there that do similar as well either already released or in the works.

Haven't played the game yet myself, but I can imagine what you're saying is true. CDPR did the same with the other two witchers. They do always seem to manage to make the world feel more alive and natural than other similar series like Dragon Age and Elder Scrolls. Though I was talking about the graphics.

Graphics are about way more than just texture quality and fancy effects, it's how it all comes together in the end visually. And in that respect Witcher 3 excels! Might not be perfect but it's still pretty damned amazing really.

 

[Pickles]

Yeah I agree it still looks great (and is a damn fine game in most other aspects as well), and while I personally haven't really made a big deal about it I can definitely understand why others have, and I think they're legitimate complaints. The explanation they gave after the release was fine, but they needed to say it way earlier. I seriously doubt it would have had a major impact on sales.

Given CDPR's track record its not really surprising that the backlash was smaller than with other titles, and they seem like the kind of company who wouldn't do something like this again after seeing the reaction. I hope.

 

[baddude1337]

You should never really buy into pre-release footage and hype anyway it's usually all bullshit. Especially "vertical slices", which are very linear and scripted and don't realistically show what the game will look or even really play like.

Remember the PS3 reveal and all those "gameplay" CGI trailers? Yeah, that was pretty awful.

Haven't played the Witcher 3, but you can see the difference in videos and sceenshots, but it still looks great. I'd say the backlash isn't as bad as Watchdogs was touted as a next gen title in terms of graphics and didn't really deliver. And now people know the graphical leap isn't anywhere near what was hyped and promised compared to the console reveals.

 

[CritialGaming]

Kinda like paying taxes right? Your paycheck says you make 15 dollars an hour but you really don't.

Same concept with tech demos.

I remember back in the Playstation days, my Dad would see a commercial for a game in which tehy showed clips from FMv footage and he would say, "I bet the game doesn't really look that good."

Duh.

It's called marketing. They show you a beautiful version of the product they are trying to sell you, when the reality sucks. Don't believe me. Go to any fast food place and see if your burger looks like the pictures.

Frankly in a video game there is only one thing that should matter to you. Is it fun? If the answer is yes, then fuck the graphics. If the answer is no, then HAHA marketing fooled you.

 

[SneakyBastard]

Frankly in a video game there is only one thing that should matter to you. Is it fun? If the answer is yes, then fuck the graphics. If the answer is no, then HAHA marketing fooled you.

Well said.

 

[FieryTrainwreck]

Buncha thoughts:

1. Despite the downgrades, it's definitely still a great-looking game.
2. It doesn't, however, have quite the same "Whoa.." factor as Witcher 2 did (understandable given the switch to open world)
3. The outrage over the downgrades isn't commensurate with the actual loss of visual fidelity because that's not what the outrage is actually about. People don't like to be misled. Doesn't matter if it's a small lie or a great big one - folks are gonna be pissed. If you've got bad news for the customer, the worst thing you can do is wait for them to discover it on their own. CDRP should have come clean right away about the downgrades and the reasons for them. Hopefully they, along with the rest of the industry, are learning from these mistakes.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

The game's fuckin' gorgeous. And this is CD Projekt RED. Even though they said they don't have plans for an Enhanced Edition, I'm willing to bet that a year from now The Witcher 3 will be a very different beast from the vanilla version.

2. It doesn't, however, have quite the same "Whoa.." factor as Witcher 2 did (understandable given the switch to open world)

The "whoa" factor comes a bit later when you truly realize how huge the game is in every way. How everything is so realistically connected. The "whoa" factor came to me when I climbed really high in Ard Skellig and looked around. It was very WHOA indeed.